The available energy of trapped electrons and its relation to turbulent transport

Abstract

A collisionless plasma possesses a certain amount of "available energy", which is that part of the thermal energy that can be converted into field energy. Here, a calculation is presented of the available energy carried by trapped electrons in a slender non-omnigenous flux tube of plasma. This quantity is compared with gyrokinetic simulations of the nonlinear saturated radial energy flux resulting from turbulence driven by collisionless trapped-electron modes in various stellarator and a tokamak. The numerical calculation of available energy is extremely fast and shows a strong correlation with the turbulent energy fluxes found in the gyrokinetic simulations. Indeed, the energy flux is found to be proportional to the available energy to the power of approximately 3/2, as one would expect from a simple phenomenological model.